Portable electronic devices such as smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and tablets have become popular and ubiquitous. More and more features have been added to these devices, and they are often equipped with powerful processors, significant memory, and open operating systems, which allow many different applications to be added. Popular applications provide functions such as calling, emailing, texting, image acquisition, image display, music and video playback, location determination (e.g., GPS), internet browsing functions, and gaming, among others. Further, such devices often include various user input components for communicating instructions to control operation of the electronic device. For example, many electronic devices are equipped not only with various buttons and/or keypads, but also with touch detecting surfaces (such as touch screens or touch pads) by which a user, simply by touching a particular area of the electronic device and/or by moving a finger along the surface of the electronic device, is able to communicate instructions to control the electronic device.
A number of such electronic devices (such as smart phones) have display screens with vertical alignment liquid crystal display (VA LCD) technology. Such display screens are preferred over other types of LCD screens because VA LCD screens have an adequate number of viewing angles and are less expensive than other technologies, such as in-plane switching LCD (IPS LCD) screens. IPS LCD screens, however, have a faster pixel transition time than VA LCD screens for transitions between colors that differ slightly in their shade.
The slower transition times of VA LCD screens can cause distortions to the graphical user interface. For example, a common blemish associated with VA LCD screens is the vanishing of dark gray lines when they are moving on a very dark gray (or black) background. This blemish is commonly known as “submarining”. This phenomenon can be observed when scrolling through the settings menu of some versions of the ANDROID operating system. Another known flaw to occur on VA LCD screens is often called “tailing”, which is an effect that occurs when a dark colored graphical object moves on a lighter colored background causing a tail of the dark color to drag behind the object as it is moved across the display.
Considering these issues, it would be desirable to provide an electronic device, having a VA LCD screen (or any other type of display with various response speeds at different gray levels), with one or more features to address one or more of these (and possibly other) concerns.